After Four Decades, Finally, the Beginning of the End

A wall was built near the Lincoln Memorial for visitors to post messages to President-elect Barack Obama. (Photo: Mitch Dumke / Reuters)

The nation's capital came alive after 11 PM on election eve, as thousands poured
into the streets to celebrate a victory that everyone was calling historic.
Car horns blaring, whooping and shouting, high fives all around, multi-racial
crowds celebrating joyously. Historic it is, most obviously in the election
of an African-American president, in a country where millions of black people
could not even vote when the new president-elect was born. The rapper Jay-Z
elegantly expressed the Obama campaign's connection to the long struggle for
equality, along with the enthusiasm that it generated: "Rosa Parks sat
so that Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so that Obama
could run. Obama's running so that we all can fly."

But there is another sense in which this election will likely turn out to be
historic. For nearly four decades, this country has been moving to the right.
Unfortunately we must include the Clinton years in this right-wing trajectory:
with such major regressive structural changes as welfare reform, the World Trade
Organization and NAFTA, the Clinton administration continued the country's rightward
drift on economic if not social issues. In other words, it continued using the
government to make rules that would redistribute income, wealth and power towards
the upper classes. (These are generally described somewhat inaccurately as "free-market"
or "free-trade" policies.)

The right's ascendancy began with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, who
rode into office on a backlash against the social movements of the 1960s, especially
the civil rights and antiwar movements. Nixon's infamous "Southern Strategy"
deployed a coded racist appeal that would help make the South Republican and
ensure that no Democratic presidential candidate would get a majority of white
voters (they didn't from 1968 to 2004).

Reagan continued this strategy, but also initiated a counterrevolution on the
economic front, decimating organized labor and cutting taxes for the rich. It
was an economic failure by any objective measure, but it succeeded in drastically
changing the ideological climate on economic issues. By the end of the Reagan
(and George H.W. Bush) administrations in 1993, the typical Democratic member
of Congress was far to the right of Richard Nixon on most economic policy.

The impact of this economic counterrevolution on the living standards of the
majority of Americans can hardly be over-emphasized. Prior to the Reagan years,
the United States was on its way to becoming more like Europe, with a welfare
state and social safety net that would allow the vast majority of its citizens
to enjoy the benefits of a developed, high-income economy. When Medicare and
Medicaid were enacted in 1965, it was widely believed that insuring the elderly
and the poor, respectively, were just the first steps toward universal health
insurance.

The assault that began with Ronald Reagan's firing of 12,000 striking air traffic
controllers in 1981 set the nation on a very different path. By the time George
W. Bush took over, he was even able to go after Social Security, the bedrock
New Deal anti-poverty program whose beneficiaries include about one-sixth of
the population. Bush lost that battle to a grass-roots groundswell of opposition.
But the fact that he could even launch such a privatization effort, where Ronald
Reagan would not even dare to tread, showed how far America had fallen from
the economics, social norms and basic ethical principles that prior generations
had taken for granted.

The end result of America's long right-wing experiment was perhaps the most
massive redistribution of income and wealth in our history. Over the last 35
years, there has been virtually no increase in real wages for the majority of
the labor force. At the same time, the top 1 percent of households (with earnings
of more than $1.2 million) saw their real incomes more than triple. A new "gilded
age" of gross class inequalities became the norm; workers without a college
degree (still more than 70 percent of the labor force) could no longer have
the same expectations of landing a job that would allow them to afford a home
and a family.

Now that long journey into darkness has finally come to an end. My own view
is that the 2006 Congressional elections may have been the turning point. It
was then that Democrats regained the Congress on the basis of a more populist
appeal by some of their candidates, and a mass revulsion with the war in Iraq.
Even if McCain had won the presidency in yesterday's election, he would have
faced great obstacles in pursuing a right-wing agenda, but he could have taken
a lot of people to their graves trying. His best bet for saving the Republican
Party from a long walk through the political wilderness would have been the
one threatened by Vice President Dick Cheney and other fellow neoconservatives:
more war, most likely beginning with a military strike against Iran. This is
how they retained the Congress in 2002, when the economy was also bleeding jobs
after the bursting of the stock market bubble and the consequent recession of
2001. From August 2002 until the November election, the build-up for the Iraq
war pushed all of the voters' most important concerns out of the news. It worked.

This time they couldn't pull it off, and Obama's election has saved us from
a repeat of these kinds of crimes. One of the most interesting things about
this election is that it also showed how the Democrats could have avoided most
of this long nightmare of right-wing rule by simply appealing to the class interests
of the key swing demographic, which is white working class voters. Like Dorothy
in "The Wizard of Oz," their way back to Kansas was right in front
of them all this time. Noncollege-educated whites with household income between
$30,000-$50,000 voted for George W. Bush by a margin of 24 percentage points;
for those with income between $50,000-$75,000 it was 41 percentage points (70-29).
Obama did not make the kind of appeal that would really clinch this demographic,
which includes many "Reagan Democrats"; but Wall Street did it for
him. The financial crisis that exploded in mid-September sealed the outcome
of this election. The Republicans' fake populist appeal to these swing voters,
painting the Democrats as an "elite" who did not respect their culture
or religion, rang hollow in the face of millions of mortgage foreclosures, job
losses, collapsing retirement savings and a shrinking economy. The politics
of deploying "weapons of mass distraction," including the so-called
"war on terror," had finally run its course.

But foreign policy will remain the Democrats' Achilles's heel for some time
to come. This is also a mostly self-inflicted handicap. The most important Democratic
leaders promote the same assumptions about foreign policy as the Republicans:
that terrorism is practically the most important threat facing our country;
that extremism and anti-US sentiment in the world has nothing to do with our
foreign policy; that America is really defending itself, or promoting "democracy,"
when it invades other countries or destabilizes foreign governments. If this
is really the state of the world, then there is some logic to voting Republican.
Why not vote for the guy who is willing to protect us by any means necessary
from these unavoidable, mortal dangers?

And someone who won't be constrained by a political base that includes peace
activists and others who might shrink from the violence necessary to defend
ourselves? Of course there are millions of Democratic Party activists and primary
voters who see right through the charade, and vote Democratic with the hope
that the jingoistic campaign rhetoric is just for show. But unfortunately, there
are a lot of voters who believe the hype from both parties, which is often reinforced
in the media. Thus, on the eve of this election, John McCain still had a 14
percentage-point edge over Barack Obama on "national security," while
trailing on almost every other issue. (Interestingly, the people of Washington,
DC, and New York City, the prior victims and most at-risk of any future terrorist
attack, are practically deaf to the right's fear-mongering - McCain lost DC
by 93 percent to 7 percent; while the most receptive audiences live in places
like Wyoming and Oklahoma where they are more likely to be hit by a meteor from
outer space than to get hurt by a foreign terrorist. This is another indicator
of how far removed the politics of "national security" are from any
real threats.)

This time, none of that stuff mattered, because the economy was going down
the drain. However, until the Democrats present a more reality-based program
on foreign policy, they will still be vulnerable to external events and the
hyping of foreign threats, even if they are ridiculously exaggerated, of our
own making or altogether imaginary.

For now, though, the domestic economy will occupy center stage as the new government
faces the worst recession in decades, and one that is just beginning - the housing
bubble that caused this recession is only about 60 percent deflated. The people
have voted for change, including expanded health care coverage and - as they
did in 2006 - an end to the Iraq war. How much change we will actually see will
depend more than anything on how much pressure there is from below.

But there is plenty to celebrate in addition to the election of our first African-American
president. Forty years is a long time for a country to be on the wrong track,
and even worse for one that has so much influence on the rest of the world.
We now have an opportunity to resume the economic and social progress that was
considered almost inevitable a few decades ago, and to address some of the most
urgent environmental problems - most importantly, climate change - which have
only recently become widely recognized. Who knows, we might even stop invading
other countries and move towards becoming a law-abiding member of the international
community. Progress is now at least possible, although it will still be an uphill
fight. As Obama himself said in his acceptance speech, "This victory alone
is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change."